Is Your Website Content Strategy Seasonal?

I often tell my customers that evergreen content is a very important part of their website content strategy. The landscape companies I work with are always fine with this suggestion for some reason, but everybody else usually needs a bit more explanation. What is evergreen content, and why is it such a crucial part of anybody’s website content strategy? Find out in today’s #whatiswednesday.

Just like an evergreen tree, evergreen content is content that will be relevant today, tomorrow and a few years from now. Examples of this type of content include product reviews, videos, lists, and how to articles. Here is some of my most popular evergreen content:

Regardless if you read these today or years from now, these will always be relevant and something people would always be interested in reading. This evergreen content is an important part of your website content strategy because it ensures that your site will continue to get traffic well into the future without you having to continually produce new and relevant articles.

As great as evergreen content is, you want to be sure to include some non-evergreen content, after all, who doesn’t love driving up to the mountains in the fall to watch the leaves change color? These more topical articles will drive a lot of traffic when they get posted, but this surge will be offset by the fact that the traffic will fade when the content is no longer relevant. Non-evergreen content includes news articles, articles focused on pop culture, and articles with statistics that are not stable. Here is an example of my non-evergreen content:

Website visitors were interested in this post because they wanted to commiserate with me on that horrible Sunday night defeat. Today, this topical blog post gets very little traffic.

So, when you’re coming up with your website content strategy, think about a beautiful fall day when the leaves turn an explosive orange while the evergreens stay bright green. This beautiful forest of information will make both your website visitors and search engines very happy.

My slide share version of this presentation is below but it is missing my examples so you may want to check those out if you are interested in perfecting your website content strategy:

Thanks for your comment Ryan. I suppose it depends on how specific your how-to’s are…. in our industry everything is changing so quickly I’m not surprised you have to update them because versions and technology change. However, if we were teach people how to tie their shoes… that would never change. 🙂 By the way, great blog I enjoyed your articles: http://webeminence.com/university/